Who won the Battle of Isandlwana?
The Zulu Kingdom won a decisive victory at Isandlwana on 22 January 1879, when an army of some 20,000 warriors under Ntshingwayo kaMahole overwhelmed a British camp and killed around 1,300 British and colonial troops in a few hours. More British officers died there than at Waterloo, and it stunned the British Empire.1
On 22 January 1879, beneath the sphinx-shaped crag of Isandlwana, a Zulu army of some 20,000 fell on a British camp and destroyed it. Around 1,300 British and colonial troops were killed in a few hours, cut down by warriors armed mostly with spears and cowhide shields. One historian calls it one of the British Empire's most harrowing actions: more British officers died there than on the field of Waterloo.2
A war by ultimatum
The war was made in Cape Town, not in Zululand. In 1877 Britain annexed the Transvaal and sent Sir Bartle Frere to South Africa as High Commissioner to draw its colonies and the Boer republics into a single confederation. An independent Zulu kingdom with a powerful army stood in the way. Frere saw it as a threat to his policy, and Theophilus Shepstone, the Secretary for Native Affairs, backed him, claiming that under King Cetshwayo the Zulu had revived their military power.3
On 11 December 1878 Frere's ultimatum was read to Zulu envoys. Among other demands, the Zulu army was to be disbanded, terms that, as the British official history admits, Cetshwayo was most unlikely to accept. The deadline passed on 11 January 1879 (some accounts give the 10th), and British columns crossed into Zululand. Cetshwayo himself favored a defensive strategy.4
Two armies
Lieutenant General Lord Chelmsford invaded with three main columns. The right column under Colonel Charles Pearson crossed near the mouth of the Tugela, the left under Colonel Evelyn Wood came in from the Transvaal, and Chelmsford himself rode with the center column, which crossed the Buffalo River at the mission station of Rorke's Drift. His plan was to force the Zulu army to battle and then take the royal homestead at Ulundi. He had little doubt of the outcome: in 1878 he had remarked that he meant to show the Zulu "how hopelessly inferior they are to us in fighting power, although numerically stronger."5
The center column's backbone was the 24th Regiment of Foot, armed with the breech-loading Martini-Henry rifle, supported by artillery, colonial volunteers, mounted police and battalions of the Natal Native Contingent, African troops raised in Natal. The Zulu army was organized in regiments, called up by the king. Cetshwayo had bought firearms before the war and his men carried thousands of old muskets and a few modern rifles, but most fought, as they had trained to fight, at close quarters with the short stabbing spear and the cowhide shield.6
An open camp below the hill
On 20 January the center column pitched its tents on the eastern slope below Isandlwana, a steep crag that British officers compared to a sphinx or a crouching lion. In front of the camp a plain stretched some 8 miles to the east. The camp was meant to be temporary, so it was neither entrenched nor ringed with wagons; the wagons were needed to keep supplies moving up from Rorke's Drift.7
On 21 January a mounted patrol under Major John Dartnell ran into a large body of Zulus to the south-east and asked for reinforcements. Chelmsford concluded that he had found the main enemy army. Before dawn on 22 January he marched out with about half the column, six companies of the 2nd Battalion, 24th, four guns and the mounted infantry, and left Lieutenant Colonel Henry Pulleine in charge of the camp with orders to defend it if attacked. He also sent word to Colonel Anthony Durnford at Rorke's Drift to bring up his mounted Natal Native Horse and a rocket battery.8
Chelmsford had guessed wrong. The main Zulu army, some 20,000 to 25,000 men under Ntshingwayo kaMahole and Mavumengwana kaNdlela, had slipped across his front and was lying silently in a valley beyond the Nqutu heights, only a few miles from the camp, lighting no fires. According to Zulu accounts gathered by the British afterward, its commanders had no intention of fighting on the 22nd, because the state of the moon made it an unlucky day; they planned to attack on the 23rd.9
The impi is found
Durnford reached the camp in mid-morning and, as the senior officer, took over command from Pulleine, but he did not stay. Hearing that Zulus had been seen on the heights to the north, he sent troops of his horsemen up onto the plateau and rode out across the plain with the rest and the rocket battery. Around noon one of his troops, under Lieutenant Charles Raw, chased a herd of cattle over a rise and suddenly found the whole Zulu army sitting below them. The regiments rose and came on at once.10
They attacked in the classic Zulu formation, likened to the horns of a buffalo: the chest drove straight at the enemy to pin him, the two horns swept wide around each flank to close the trap, and the loins waited in reserve. The right horn swung behind Isandlwana hill toward the road to Rorke's Drift, the chest came over the heights toward the camp, and the left horn pushed out across the plain against Durnford's retreating horsemen.11
The firing line
Pulleine pushed his companies of the 24th out into an extended firing line well in front of the tents, eventually about one and a half miles long and bent at an angle to face north and east, with the two guns in the angle and the Native Contingent in between. For a time the volleys worked. The Zulu center went to ground under the fire, and on the right Durnford's men held a watercourse and slowed the left horn. But the line was thin and far from the camp, and the horns kept spreading wider.12
Durnford's horsemen began to run short of ammunition and fell back. Whether the 24th's companies also ran low has been argued over ever since. The old story of ammunition boxes that could not be opened has been weakened by the discovery of bent screws from the boxes out on the firing line, and the official history notes only that the last groups fought on "till, their ammunition being expended, they were overpowered."13
The camp is overrun
Soon after 1 p.m. the British tried to pull the line back toward the tents. As the Native Contingent at the angle gave way, the Zulu chest charged into the gap, and the companies on the left were caught before they could close up or fix bayonets. The guns limbered up and galloped for the neck behind the camp, only to find that the right horn had already closed the road to Rorke's Drift. Inside the camp men fought hand to hand among the tents, and small groups of the 24th held together until they were overwhelmed; the last of them were probably Captain Reginald Younghusband's company on the slopes of the hill. Organized resistance ended at about 2 p.m.14
Witnesses on both sides remembered the sky going dark. There was a partial eclipse of the sun that afternoon, though one recent study points out that it was only partial, peaked at about 2:30 p.m., and would hardly have been noticed in the bright summer light, so the darkness that so many recalled may have had another cause.15
The survivors ran south-west across broken country toward the Buffalo River, some 4 miles away. The Zulus outran men on foot, and many horsemen drowned at the crossing ever since called Fugitives' Drift. Lieutenant Teignmouth Melvill tried to carry the Queen's Color of the 1st Battalion, 24th, to safety, joined by Lieutenant Nevill Coghill. Melvill was swept from his horse in the river, Coghill turned back to help him, and both were killed on the Natal bank. The color was recovered from the river on 4 February.16
The dead
The British official history counted 52 officers and 806 white soldiers killed, with several hundred African troops and non-combatants besides; modern totals put the dead at around 1,300, including some 800 regular soldiers. Durnford died in a last stand on the neck behind the camp, among volunteers and men of the 24th who had rallied to him. Only a few dozen Europeans, most of them mounted, escaped. The Zulus carried off the camp's stores and ammunition and its rifles.17
Zulu losses were heavy too and were never counted. The official British estimate was not less than 1,000 killed, and a figure of more than 3,000 is often accepted. Zulu accounts later said they had lost more men at Isandlwana than in all the other battles of the war together. How many warriors attacked is also uncertain: the 1881 official history, relying on statements by Zulus who had been at Isandlwana, put the army at 13,700, while modern historians generally give some 20,000.18
Rorke's Drift
The Zulu reserve, the regiments under Cetshwayo's half-brother Dabulamanzi kaMpande, had not fought in the main battle. Late that afternoon they crossed the Buffalo and attacked the small British depot at Rorke's Drift, warned just in time by fugitives from Isandlwana. Lieutenants John Chard and Gonville Bromhead and Assistant Commissary James Dalton decided to stand, and a garrison of about 150 men held the post through the night against about 4,000 Zulus, for some 12 hours. Seventeen defenders were killed and some 400 to 500 Zulus. Eleven Victoria Crosses were awarded, a celebration Britain was glad to have after the disaster.19 › The Greatest Last Stands in History
What Isandlwana changed
Paradoxically, the victory doomed Cetshwayo's hopes of a negotiated peace. When the news reached London on 11 February, the government, which had not been eager for the war, sent large reinforcements to restore British prestige. Wood's column was beaten at Hlobane on 28 March but crushed a major Zulu attack at Kambula the next day, Chelmsford won at Gingindlovu on 2 April, and on 4 July 1879 his army, formed in a hollow square, broke the last great Zulu attack at Ulundi and burned the royal homestead.20 › Battle of Hlobane, 1879
Cetshwayo was captured in August and exiled to Cape Town, and Zululand was split among chiefs friendly to Britain. He was later taken to London, was restored to part of his kingdom in 1883, but civil war followed, and he died the following year. In London the government had already decided to supersede Chelmsford with Sir Garnet Wolseley.21
For many in Britain the battle was a shock that a spear-armed army could rout the redcoats. Seen from the other side, it was a victory won by discipline, speed and skilled command, and the Zulu commanders had in a single afternoon destroyed a British column armed with breech-loading rifles and artillery. Other armies would later learn the same lesson.22 › Battle of Adwa, 1896
The battlefield today
Isandlwana lies in KwaZulu-Natal, reached from Dundee by the R68 toward Nqutu, and visitors pay their entrance fee at the site before walking the field. White-painted stone cairns mark where the British dead were buried, memorials stand to both the British and the Zulu fallen, and an interpretation center and museum at St Vincent's sits beside the field. Above the Buffalo River, a memorial to Melvill and Coghill stands at Fugitives' Drift, and Rorke's Drift is a short drive away.23
The battle also lives on in paint. Charles Edwin Fripp, who walked the field four weeks after the defeat while the dead still lay unburied, later painted The Battle of Isandlwana, now in the National Army Museum in London; the museum itself concedes that his picture is more heroic than the battle can have been.24 › Battle of the Little Bighorn, 1876
